United Liberty

Thomas Sowell, a renowned free market economist and author, recently talked about his new book, Intellectuals and Race, in an appearance on Fox News. During the interview, Sowell, who is an African-American, told Tucker Carlson that minimum wage laws have hurt black workers:

In an appearance on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity” with fill-in host and Daily Caller editor in chief Tucker Carlson, author Thomas Sowell argued that the federal minimum wage law has been used to undermine companies that employ blacks.

In the fourth quarter of 2012, the black unemployment rate was more than double the rate for whites. But prior to the 1930s, Sowell said, black unemployment was actually lower than white unemployment.

“What changed was the government intervention into the labor market,” Sowell said. “1930 was the last year in which there was no federal minimum wage. They brought in the Davis Bacon Act.”

Mort Zuckerman one of the top 200 richest men in the world and current editor of U.S. News and World Report has been painted by some conservatives as a liberal that has seen the light”. But has he?

Mort Zuckerman’s latest attack on the president’s policies occurred in an editorial in the U.S. News and World Report, which was subsequently linked to on the Drudge Report last Friday.

In it he lambasted our current president’s economic policies and labels them a “failure.” I agree with Mort on this point. Mort, like a lot of conservatives and every liberal, does not get to the heart of what has been going wrong in the halls of Congress, in the Oval Office or the chambers of the Supreme Court for the last 100 years. What Mort fails to realize is that the collectivist central planning of our economy and governing of Individual behavior by all the previous administrations, along with the monopoly of the money supply and the setting of interest rates by the Federal Reserve and the endless wars overseas  has led us to the where we are today.

Mort’s failure to see that the collectivist ideology that underpins the entire U.S. government budget is the ONLY REASON for the “Great Recession” that most of us are endruing today. (Around Washington D.C. there is no recession.)  Instead of advocating for less central planning and control by politicians and bureaucrats over the lives and wallets of individuals he advocates for more. Instead of advocating for more individual liberty, he advocates for more government intervention.

Here’s your “no sh*t” moment of the day. The TARP “watchdog” says that the bailouts have made “too big to fail” part of public policy:

The watchdog for the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) issued its final verdict on the bailouts Wednesday in a mixed report that credited the program with stabilizing the economy but warned that a “too big to fail” mentality might persist.
[…]
But the group noted that the extraordinary intervention might have ingrained a “too big to fail” mentality in the financial markets, and perhaps in corporate America.

“By protecting very large banks from insolvency and collapse, the TARP also created moral hazard: Very large financial institutions may now rationally decide to take inflated risks because they expect that, if their gamble fails, taxpayers will bear the loss,” the report stated, adding that government efforts to save domestic auto manufacturers might have spread that hazard to non-financial institutions as well.

“The implication being that any company in America can receive a government backstop, so long as its collapse would cost enough jobs or deal enough economic damage,” the report stated.

Of course, they also claim the bailout was crucil to ensuring stability. Well, when you’re giving out taxpayer money to institutions that made poor decisions and would have otherwise failed, I’m sure they were relieved. But when the next economic troubles happen - whether it’s financial institutions or an auto industry producing cars no one wants, bailouts will be the policy of whatever administration is in power and Congress.

Few things in life confound me more than the propensity of the political left to put unbridled faith in the government’s ability to make wise decisions for us all, while simultaneously treating purveyors of goods and services on the free market as if they were shady characters lurking in some beer bottle strewn, garbage littered back alley, just waiting to take advantage of the unsuspecting traveler lost and wandering into the wrong side of town.

In the free market, those who provide goods and services must do so (theoretically, at least…pretending big business and big government don’t collude to rig the market to the advantage of those willing to pay) by providing those goods or services with a level of quality superior to those of their competitors at a given price point. And because businesses are subject to the profit motive, they must constantly work to become more efficient and innovative than their competitors. If they fail to do so, they lose market share, which means they lose money, which means they go out of business. Many companies that were once king of the hill have fallen by the wayside, victims to more innovative upstarts. Remember Eastern Airlines, Atari video games, American Motor Company, Rich’s, Datsun, Woolworth’s, KB Toys and Enron? All were once major players in their markets, and all are now nowhere to be found.

The process of “creative destruction”, by which the existing economic order is constantly churned by the very nature of free market dynamics, is what drives the rapid advances in technology and efficiency. Oddly enough, the concept of creative destruction finds its roots in Marxist economic theory, tracing back to Karl Marx’s The Communist Manifesto and later Das Kapital. Of course, Marx saw the concept as negative, preferring the economy to be managed by a powerful central government directing the lives of its citizens by force.

A new Pew Research poll shows that the distrust of our government is continuing to grow and at a steady pace:

The in-depth poll found Americans not only rejecting the idea of an activist government, but a growing number urging that its power be curtailed. The findings reinforce the anti-big government message of tea party rallies and suggest anew that incumbents, particularly Democrats, face a strong headwind in this fall’s elections for control of Congress.

“By almost every conceivable measure, Americans are less positive and more critical of government these days,” said the report from the non-partisan Pew Research Center.

The center said its new survey found “a perfect storm of conditions associated with distrust of government - a dismal economy, an unhappy public, bitter partisan-based backlash and epic discontent with Congress and elected officials.”

A key finding: Americans oppose greater government control over the economy by a margin of 51-40 percent.

That’s a reversal from just a year ago, when they supported greater government control by a margin of 54-37 percent.

Unfortunately, Washington is oblivious to the reasons why.